Proxy war spreads to Gujarat

 

Gujarat is experiencing proxy war and not just a communal riot. Indian Muslims have become pawns in Pakistan’s Jihad against India.

‘Diabolical designs’

In a recent article, Lt. Gen. Narasimhan (Retd.) highlighted an important strategic point about the Gujarat disturbances. They are part of Pakistan’s plans to create turmoil in India so that army troops that are guarding the border are drawn in to control the riots. After its massive defeat in the 1972 Bangladesh War, Pakistan realized that it would be wiped out in a conventional war with India. So it evolved a strategy of low intensity warfare in Kashmir that would keep large numbers of India troops involved. This year Pakistan engineered the Godhra attack and instigated the flare up in Gujarat to draw the army in. As The Pioneer recently reported (‘Diabolical Design,’ April 22, 2002):

“The game plan is to push freshly-recruited and trained terrorists into Kashmir and merge them with predominantly local Kashmiri terrorist groups like the Hijb-ul Mujahideen to herald a summer of bloodshed. The plan is part of the unfinished agenda of Kargil, 1999, which President Musharraf had masterminded. The danger along the LoC is apparent; field commanders are naturally worried about the fall-out of a heavy military engagement. A strong counter-offensive would therefore serve as the right deterrent to stymie Pakistan's diabolic designs in the Kashmir Valley this summer.”

This is helped if Indian army units are moved from Kashmir to places like Gujarat. Godhra, and possibly more such future provocations are part of the same plan—to engage the army in keeping peace within India instead of guarding the Indo-Pak border, to redress the major military advantage that India enjoys over Pakistan.

To the military unbalance should be added the growing economic unbalance. While the Indian economy is growing by leaps and bounds, Pakistan is turning into an economic basket case. As a result, when India moved its forces to the ready position on the Indo-Pak border, Pakistan quickly realized that it could not afford to maintain the position indefinitely as India can. And a recent World Bank report admitted as much, saying that maintaining troops in readiness was an intolerable drain on its economy. As a result, what we are seeing in Gujarat is the extension of the proxy war into other parts of India, using willing elements in the Indian Muslim community and its ‘leaders’.

Yet, despite these overwhelming odds, the Pakistani leadership, General Musharraf included, is not willing to let go of its imperial designs. And, true their form, Indian ‘secularists’, especially the English language media, have become their mouthpiece. One needs to go no further than the columns of Sri Kuldip Nayar, the prince of Hindu-baiters. He has not only claimed that Gujarat is even worse than the Partition, but even gone so far as to proclaim that Gujarat explosion was pre-planned, which would have taken place even without the attack on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra! What is his evidence—he has none. We must take him at his word. But this calumny was picked up first by the British mission and then the European Commission, ever anxious to find some means to please the Muslims.

European Dhimmis

To understand the antics of the British mission and the European commission, we need to recognize that they are living in a state of perpetual fear of Muslims in their own countries. The ultra-conservative candidate Jean-Marie le Pen has captured the imagination of French voters by appealing to the fear of Muslim migrants. At the same time they are aware of the dependence of their materialistic civilization on Islamic oil. This has given rise to a mindset that the Islamic scholar Bat Ye’or calls Dhimmitude.  Dhimmitude is nothing but negationist accommodation rooted in fear. As Brigadier Malik wrote in his seminal The Quranic Concept of War: “Once a condition of terror into the opponent’s heart is obtained, hardly anything is left to be achieved… Terror is not a means of imposing decision upon the enemy; it is the decision we wish to impose upon him.” Muslims have essentially succeeded in imposing this fear in the minds of a large section of the European ruling class.

Their latest exercise of a report on the Gujarat violence is an exercise in dhimmitude. Britain in particular is scared that a British national, Omar Sheikh has become the target of investigation in the US and Pakistan for the kidnap and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. So the death of two Gujarati Muslim British nationals came as a handy excuse for the British to prove to the Muslims that they were on their side. (What were they doing in Gujarat in the first place? Were they like Omar Sheikh, ISI agents working for Pakistan?)

This too is part of dhimmitude. As Bat Ye’or pointed out: “Today, the United States and Europe compete for the favor of the Muslim world by once again abandoning the victimized peoples to its mercies. The Gulf War against Saddam Hussein on the question of oil interests (1991) was redeemed by the destruction of Yugoslavia and the creation of new centers of Islamist influence in the heart of the Balkans… The war to annihilate Serbia was intended to punish the crimes of Milosevic and his regime, but the media campaigns endeavored to calm the anti-Westernism in the Muslim world and of Muslim immigrants in Europe. It also helped to gain forgiveness for the war on Iraq by a strong pro-Muslim counterbalancing policy in the Balkans.” This is what the European Commission, with Britain in the lead is trying to do in Gujarat also— currying favor with the Muslim world by attacking the Narendra Modi Government.

Secularism = Minorityism + Dhimmitva

While the Europeans—and the Americans to a lesser extent—are driven by their dhimmitude, the Indian secularists are driven by more complex emotions. While dhimmitude, which in the Indian context should be called ‘Dhimmitva’, is a significant component of their mindset there are also factors like career and credibility. Godhra has called their bluff, just as surely as the ‘Harappan horse’ called the bluff of their hero Michael Witzel. Like him, they have lost all credibility and feel humiliated. Their outlook all along has been that the majority should live like dhimmis—or contented slaves—while they themselves enjoy the privilege and protection of their imperial masters by heaping insult on everything that their Hindu brothers and sisters hold sacred. This is what they call secularism, which is really nothing more than a combination of minority communalism and dhimmitva.

This cozy world has now collapsed. They have to face the wrath of an enraged mass and the continuing decline of their patrons. They see no choice left to them but indulge in endless negation, just as Witzel is doing denying everything from the horse to the Sarasvati River. Kuldip Nayar’s latest exercise inventing a vast conspiracy that seeks to erase the role of Godhra is the latest episode in this negationist exercise. It also points to the direction in which the secularist dhimmis are moving. We can expect more of the same, leading to more and more absurd exercises. Recent events have shaken them beyond the realm of reason.

The tragedy of this is that these dhimmis are now too concerned about their own existence to see the obvious danger to India of the proxy war moving to Gujarat, later to spread across other parts of the country. Instead of reflecting on the folly of their past positions, they are pouring more fuel on the fire by increasing the intensity of their anti-Hindu rhetoric. This carries a special message for Indian Muslims: neither Pakistan nor the secularists care a hoot for them. As far as they are concerned, Indian Muslims are just deluded pawns to be used in advancing their own interests. The Muslims and their leaders should recognize the danger and reject their siren song communalism masquerading as secularism. With friends like these they need no enemies. A safe India, not strong Pakistan, is their best safeguard even if it doesn’t suit the secularist dhimmis.